


Daemons From the Past

by TheBodyBioelectric



Category: Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics), Marvel 616, Spider-Woman (Comic), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:35:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3971212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBodyBioelectric/pseuds/TheBodyBioelectric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol came back from space. Jess knows she should be happy, but sometimes the past has a mind of it's own.</p><p>Slightly more violence than canon-typical</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You messed up

**Author's Note:**

> I appreciate constructive criticism, so please review! This story is set after Carol comes back from space (I haven’t read the full run, other than, you know, space). This is loose cannon, because I’m a loose cannon.

Jess watched Carol as she scrolled through another file on her tablet, trying to fill in more gaps in her memory. Her face scrunch up in surprise as she read, which turned to a bemused cocksure Carol grin that slowly spread over her face.

“You’re country of birth is Wundagore,” Carol said to Jess as she looked up. “That cannot be a real thing.”

“You said you were reading Wolverine’s file,” Jess said as she scowled slightly. Carol had come back from space, and she should have just told her. Hell, she should have told her in the hospital, when Carol first lost her memories. But she wouldn’t have understood.

“I finished,” Carol said dismissively, bringing Jess back to the reality that it was really Carol sitting there.

“Yeah right,” Jess said. “It’s like eight times as long as everyone else’s, and I saw you doing a lot of very fast scrolling.”

“Maybe I’m a fast reader, Ms. PI,” Carol said. “Besides, I like this one better.”

“Carol, you already read my file,” Jess said as she felt an edge creep into her voice before she cut herself off. “Maybe you should read a file that’s useful?“

“I swear that there’s something in this that’s missing,” Carol said.

“But only a Jedi could have erased those files,” Jess said, rolling her eyes. 

“Har de har har,” Carol said. “You’re the worst. You’re lucky I got to the important cultural references first.”

“Watching Star Wars was not important. Anyways, you seem pretty sure of yourself for someone who’s lost all of her memories,” Jess said. An awkward pause settled over the two of them.

“Jess, I’m sorry,” said Carol.

“What?” said Jess.

“For losing my memories. I know I did the right thing, but I wish that there was another way,” Carol said in a weary voice.

“There was,” Jess said icily. “Or did you forget that too?”

Carol looked like she had been slapped. “I’m sorry I care about New York getting destroyed.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t care about me,” Jess said.

“Listen, Jessica, I did what I thought was best. You think this is hard for you? I don’t remember anything. Nothing. I’m flying blind, and now the woman who was supposed to be my best friend is mad at me and I only have the faintest idea why,” Carol said.

“You left me, Carol, because you couldn’t stand not being in the limelight, and I wasn’t good enough,” Jess said, hands balling into fists. “And then you ran away to space. Why the hell wouldn’t I be mad?”

“I needed to find myself! You of all people should understand that,” Carol said as anger seeped into her. She liked the way it felt. She hated that, but feeling again felt good, like stretching unused muscles.

“Me of all people? Yes, I certainly understand being abandoned pretty damn well,” Jess said, raising her voice.

“Jess, I didn’t run away,” Carol said, starting to glow slightly. “In case you didn’t notice, I came back. I came back because I thought that maybe, just maybe, you wanted me to come back, and maybe I owed it to you. I don’t need this.”

“Carol, you never need this, and that’s the problem,” Jess said.

“I don’t even know what this is, why would I need this?” Carol spat.

“Because I don’t want to lose you like I lost…” Jess’s voice became hoarse and quiet. “Well, take your pick.”

“Jess. Jessica,” Carol said, touching Jess on the arm. “I am not going to leave you. I’m pretty sure I already care about you too much already.”

“I…” Jess said, feeling herself get lost in Carol’s eyes again before being reminded for the millionth time that Carol didn’t know her. Or did she catch a flicker in her eye… no. How could she? How could the most screwed over woman on earth really get that lucky twice?

“Jess, I just don’t understand,” Carol said. “I get being mad. But I left because I had to. I came back. Why are you acting like I took another girl to prom?”

“Because you kind of did,” Jess heard herself saying. Why did she say that? She tried desperately to shut up before…

“Jess, what do you mean?” Carol said, edging a bit closer. 

Jess’s phone rang loudly.

“I need to take this,” Jessica said. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Yeah,” Carol said, crossing her arms and flicking her wrist in annoyance. “Yeah, sure. I’ll be flying around the tower. If you need me, come and get me.” 

Jess nodded and took the call.


	2. Time Flies When You're Having Fun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More talking!

Jess looked at her caller id briefly before she closed her eyes and said, “Hey Lindsay.”

“Hi, Jess,” Lindsay said. “Sorry for just calling you out of the blue like this.”

“Yeah,” Jess said, feeling her chest tighten after hearing the voice over the phone. “What do you want, Lindsay?”

“Nice to hear from you, too,” Lindsay said. 

“Sorry, Lindsay,” Jess said. “I’m not in the best mood right now, so I’d rather you just tell me what you want.”

“I don’t want anything other than to warn you that I’m hearing rumors about something big happening,” she said. “There’s chatter about a weapon floating around the black market that’s immensely powerful.”

“Any verification?” Jess asked.

“No,” she said. “But it seemed like an Avengery type problem.”

Jess sighed.

“Lindsay, that is possibly the most ridiculous excuse to call me,” Jess said.

“It wasn’t just an excuse,” Lindsay said, sounding deflated. “The chatter is real. But I did want to talk, too.”

“What’s there to talk about Lindsay?” Jess said. “You didn’t want the commitment, I did. What more do you want?”

“Jess, I didn’t just want to use you,” Lindsay said. “I fell out of a building for you.”

“And somehow marriage seemed like too much effort,” Jess said. “I mean, we lived together for years… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to start again.”

“I didn’t want there to be hard feelings. Guess I’m a little late on that,” Lindsay said. “Next time I’ll just leave a message with Jarvis.”

Jess hung up the phone. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger as she tried to reason out what to do about Lindsay. She shook her head. If Carol wasn’t being so brooding and obstinate, she wouldn’t have a problem. She could just hang up and leave Lindsay McCabe in San Francisco along with her metabolic pills and her wig.

But Carol wasn’t there, and Jess needed to forget, even for a little. She sighed. 

She walked over to one of the many launching points from the tower, her gaze drawn into the night sky. She heard a faint rustle of wind behind her and turned to see a reflection of herself in the mirrored glass of Stark Tower. To her horror, she saw Veranke’s face again, for the thousandth time. She shuddered and felt weak at the knees, and barely controlled her urge to vomit in disgust. 

“No!” Jess shrilly screamed at the reflection. Veranke laughed at her while she watched the flesh on her face slowly melt off, leaving the bloody skull exposed. The teeth clacked as the skull kept laughing.

“Did you forget? This is who you are, Jessica! You can’t kill me without killing yourself. Why would she love you?” the skull cackled before it exploded into a thousand shards of light. Jessica closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was staring back at her normal red and yellow reflection.

She sat down for a minute to calm her nerves. Months after the skrull invasion, and she still got these visions. Jessica Drew looked down at her arm and half expected to see marionette strings, but none materialized. She wondered if this was some sort of after effect of the skrulls or just her own morbid imagination. She wondered which was worse. 

She felt the familiar feeling of powerlessness boiling over, and she realized she needed to do something about it.

Several deep breaths later, and Jess jumped off the side of the building.

Gliding with her gossamer wings in the strong updrafts felt far more natural to Jessica than using the flight that the skrulls had given her. She always felt far calmer on a current, gently floating through the air. 

Flying made her feel good, but gliding was what Jessica Drew did.

She saw Carol streaking in angry patterns over the tower, flying in an intricate series of high G turns. She let off a bright low yield venom blast to signal to Carol that she wanted to talk. However, a pair of bright red eyes also saw the green burst of light from their place hidden in the shadows.

“Hi,” Carol said tersely as she came to a stop on the ledge next to where Jess was sitting. “Who were you on the phone with?”

“Just an old girlfriend,” Jess said.

“You like girls?” Carol asked, eyebrow raised.

“Um, yeah,” Jess said, taken slightly aback. “I like to be low key about it, so it’s not in the file, but yeah. Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Carol’s eyebrows collided in uncertainty as she gave Jessica Drew a once over.

“Wait, did we…” asked Carol after a pause.

“Yeah,” Jess said. She felt like trash for telling her. Now Carol was probably going to try to be with her because she felt obligated.

“When did we…?” Carol said.

“It was after Madripoor,” Jess said, taking a deep breath. “After we killed Kaviti Kali. We were on the quinjet, and you told me that I was acting like an idiot for running off and not trusting you. And I told you that I couldn’t trust myself, so how could I ask you to trust me? And then you asked why I couldn’t trust myself, and I told you that I couldn’t be honest with you, and that when I almost died I realized that I didn’t actually want to for the first time in forever and that I might never tell you what I felt and...”

Jess finally ran out of breath as she felt her throat constrict and a little shudder wrack her head. She was stuck there shuddering and trying to fucking breath and oh god did Carol just put her arm around her? Jess wanted to move away, knew that it was the right thing to do. But she couldn’t make herself move away from the comfort. 

“What happened next?” Carol asked softly. 

“You kissed me,” Jess said in hoarse whisper and turned her head away.

“I did?” Carol asked.

“Yeah,” said Jess. “You just leaned over in your seat and... Afterwards we started having lunch together. A lot.”

“That explains a lot,” Carol said. “Like why I haven’t been able to keep my eyes off of your yellow triangle.”

“On my forehead?”

“Sure.” 

“Oh,” Jess said as she turned a shade that complimented the scarlet of her costume. “You’re not… mad?”

“Well,” said Carol. “Was it good?”

“Y-yeah. It was good,” Jess said, feeling relieved, like the old Carol might me back. Maybe. 

“The triangle has a purpose, you know.”

“You are literally the most adorable,” said Carol.

“It’s spider coloration!” said Jess, crossing her arms.

“Spiders do need to make their boobs look magnificent,” Carol said with a smile.

“You are the worst,” Jess said, smiling in spite of herself. She squeezed herself a little closer to Carol, because it just felt really good and maybe Carol was ok with it now. 

“So um… did you want to try again?” Carol asked.

“I… yeah,” Jess said. “I just want to be back with you. Screw being right about the whole memory thing.”

“You’re cute when you’re wrong,” said Carol.

“Let’s not get carried away here,” said Jess. “You’re still wrong too.”

“I’m less wrong than you. Do you know why?” said Carol, Cheshire grin spreading across her face.

“I can’t guess,” said Jess, grinning back.

“Because I’m the best,” they said in unison. Carol looked over, slightly befuddled.

“I’ve said that before, haven’t I,” she said.

“Once or twice,” said Jess, smirking slightly. 

“We’re ok then?” Carol said.

“As long as you don’t do stupid things, yes,” Jess said, smiling. “Well, really stupid things.”

“Since being the best is my catchphrase, it makes sense I have the best girlfriend,” Carol said, eyes twinkling as Jess was suddenly at a loss for words. Jess felt Carol put her arm around her, and Jess finally cuddled all the way into Carol’s warm body. 

Jess felt Carol’s steady breathing as she leaned her head against her shoulder. Jess, for the first time in months, really smiled. She put her hand on Carol’s lap, and Carol held it. Jess forgot how warm Carol’s hands were. She could feel the heat through her gloves, warming her hand against the chill of the night.

“Hey Carol, do you remember how to kiss?” Jess asked.

“I think I can manage,” Carol said with a smile. 

Jess leaned forward slowly and placed a delicate kiss on Carol’s lips, hoping the moment wouldn’t break.

“That was a peck, Ms. Drew,” Carol said as she slid her fingers through the hair on the back of Jess’s neck. “This is a kiss.”

Carol pressed her lips deeply into Jessica’s, and for breathless moments Jess forgot everything except for Carol. She felt her body heat up, and not just from Carol’s warmth, even though she felt like magma under her, and she actually let out a little whimper, which is so not what an avenger should do. 

“So I still got the hang of it,” Carol said with that crooked Carol grin, and Jess felt the shuddering come back. She felt the sobs start deep in her lungs, and they built until she couldn’t hold them back anymore. Carol slid an arm around her waist and held her head to her chest as Jessica Drew cried into her suit.

After a few minutes, Jessica hugged Carol as hard as she could, which probably wasn’t that hard because it was Carol, but it made her feel better. She finally looked up into Carol’s kind eyes, so painfully kind that she knew she didn’t deserve them. But she needed them, and they were there, and Jessica Drew could be selfish maybe just this once.

Jess finally let herself get completely lost in Carol’s baby blues. It wasn’t exactly like before. But she had Carol back and that was enough. Everything else would sort itself out.

Then the world fell away from underneath her in an explosion of mortar and light.


	3. Skrulled Over

Jess felt herself falling, and instinctively tucked herself into a dive to gain speed. When she pulled up she automatically started looking for her assailant. 

She saw that Carol had flown almost straight up and was starting after whoever had attacked them. Jess saw a figure in the distance with a long white stick sitting on what looked like a winged horse. Internally gritting her teeth at the unnatural feeling, she used her enhanced flight power to catch up with the two rapidly retreating figures.

“Jarvis? This is Jess, we’re chasing after someone on a winged horse,” Jess said over the radio in her suit. “Call another avenger to cover for us. Also, if you could get a mop for when Carol gets through with them, that would be lovely.”

“Of course, Ms. Drew,” said Jarvis. Almost immediately after Jess closed the com, she flew within hearing of Carol and the winged figure.

Over the sound of the wind whipping past Jess’s super sensitive ears, she heard Carol say, “You attack my girlfriend with a horse and a stick? I’m doing you a favor hitting the stupid out of you!”

Jess saw a brilliant flash of yellow as Carol staggered the black armored figure in his saddle. Jess strained to be more than a bystander as she saw Carol fly up to the slumped figure.

“Let’s see what’s behind door number dumb,” Carol said as she grabbed the armored figure by the front and pulled back for a punch.

“Carol!” Jess screamed at the top of her lungs, knowing even as she did it was too late for Carol to react in time. She recognized the skull figure on the armored man’s face, even if Carol didn’t: it was Dreadknight. And while Carol was nearly invulnerable to energy weapons, she was still basically human.

“A concentrated dose of nerve gas is what!” Dreadknight cackled as both figures were enveloped in a cloud. 

Jess didn’t register herself scream as she saw Carol crumple in the air. She focused entirely on intercepting Carol before she crashed into the skyscrapers beneath them. She couldn’t be dead, this was Carol.

Jess dove faster.

She managed to catch Carol in her arms and gently decelerate, making sure not to hurt her. She desperately checked her for signs of life. Jess started breathing again. Carol was breathing. That was good. 

Jess tried to think of the nearest hospital when a burst of energy that was far too close to hitting the two reminded her that she had a fight to finish before she could help Carol. Depositing Carol gently onto a roof top, she immediately turned skyward. 

He had hurt Carol. He was going to rediscover the meaning of pain. 

Jess flew up towards Dreadknight in a zig zag pattern, weaving in and out of the blasts from his lance. Jess flew underneath him on her last approach, where Dreadknight couldn’t aim at her. Instead of waiting to use her venom blast until after she came out the other side, however, she simply shot the horse from below. 

It crumpled into unconsciousness and fell through the air, throwing Dreadknight off it’s back. After a few moments it recovered and glided away on it’s out stretched wings. Jessica caught the rider roughly and threw him onto the rooftop below once the height was no longer fatal. Well, probably not fatal.

Jess dropped with him nearly as fast as he fell. Once he was on the roof Jess was immediately on top of him as she felt her palm connect with his facemask the first time. She didn’t feel the impacts as she struck again and again. Her strikes grew harder each time, like a snake bludgeoning its victim. 

She heard him release his nerve gas, a quip on his lips. She laughed and grabbed his chest, slamming his head into the ground over and over. 

Jessica sensed his desperation, and for the first time she felt good causing pain. It was only after she started to hear the sickening thud of flesh meeting concrete that she realized Dreadknight was unconscious. She suddenly wanted to throw up.

Holding her hand to her mouth, she looked up, and saw Carol sitting up, leaning over so that she could see the beating in closer detail. Her eyes gleamed brightly as she grinned.

“What, Jessica? Why did you stop? Don’t you love me?” Carol said pleadingly.

Jess felt her stomach heave for the second time that night. She took a step back, and felt the sweat pooling under her suit turn as ice cold as the inside of her bowels. 

“Carol…?” Jess asked.

“What? Just finish it and then we can go,” she said, “My healing factor is working wonders for my-“

And that’s when Jess shot her with a venom blast.

It shouldn’t have hurt her. Carol’s thing was absorbing energy. But Carol screamed bloody murder, and writhed on the ground, and Jess knew it was a skrull. She fired again, releasing all of her bio-energy at once. 

The skrull screamed. The blast had ripped through its leg, burning the flesh into an alien briquette. It pathetically crawled towards her, showing a face that was Carol’s, but green and twisted in pain.

She should have known. She should have known that Carol couldn’t have forgiven her. How could she have been so naive as to think that someone would want her, twice?

“Jessicaaa,” the skrull rasped. “Help meee…”

Jessica grabbed it by the hair, dragging it along the gravel of the rooftop. It screamed it Carol’s voice again. Jessica hated it, how much it sounded like her. She picked it up and held it over the ledge.

“Why?” it croaked, trying to copy Carol’s puppy dog eyes.

“Why not?” she asked, holding back bitter tears as she pulled it close to her face.

“Why not!” she screamed into its face. And then she let go.

The skrull fell onto the car below from 25 stories up. Given how easy it had been to subdue, Jess would have expected it to splatter all over the pavement in a most satisfactory manner. When it didn’t, she started to worry.

She glided down to where the body lay. As she got closer, she realized the face wasn’t green. 

The face had to be green. Skrulls couldn’t keep their faces changed, not when they were dead, not unless…

“Jess,” Carol, the real Carol, croaked, trying to hold out a hand to her, but she was interrupted by a coughing fit. Bloody foam started to come out of her mouth as the coughs wracked her body with increasingly violent intensity until Carol stopped breathing.

She wanted to hold Carol, to comfort her, to tell her all the things she felt about her, but she was too panicked, and just stood there as it happened. When her breathing stopped, she checked her pulse.

Jessica finally threw up.

She left her Avengers card and headset piled neatly next to Carol’s body, and flew away into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wait, what? This isn't tagged for Major Character Death, you Hack!
> 
>  
> 
> Yeah, well, it's not. Please believe me when I say that its for a good reason. Rest assured, the next chapter is already written, so this won't be one of those perpetually unresolved cliffhangers. Cheers!


	4. Shell Game

It took Jarvis two minutes to realize that something was wrong after hearing Jessica scream into the microphone. He had assumed it to just be very odd battle banter at first, but after he heard the retching sounds he knew that something strange was happening.

He of course immediately contacted the on call avenger, Spider-man. He was quite perplexed when he found a foe of the Avengers thought to be inactive, Dreadknight, on top of a building only a couple blocks from Avengers Tower with severe injuries, although this was not entirely without precedent. 

The most peculiar thing of all was that he reported that Captain Marvel had just awoken from unconsciousness in the street, apparently with a slight headache from nerve gas, lying next to Ms. Drew’s Avengers card and headset.   
\-----------

Jessica Drew didn’t know what she was doing as she flew over the New York countryside alone. 

She had been alone before. She had reinvented herself plenty of times; starting off with nothing more than the story of misery she had from the most recent chapter of her life. She had been on the run from international authorities before, and even universally hated by everyone. Hell, she had even runaway from a dead lover before. 

But it had never been Carol.

Jess really didn’t know where to go, or if she even wanted to go anywhere. All she knew was that she couldn’t deal with being around people, not right now. She couldn’t ruin anyone else’s life.

She briefly entertained the idea that it wasn’t her fault, not really, because maybe delusions didn’t count as murder. Maybe her teammates could forgive her.

She actually laughed at herself.

At some point, almost without her noticing it, her Hydra training and years of experience at being on the run kicked in.

If there was one thing Jessica Drew would admit to being really good at, it was running away.  
\----------

“How do ALL the cameras short out, Tony?” Carol asked, exasperated. 

“Because I didn’t build them,” he said. Carol responded with a glower because she couldn’t actually kill Tony until he answered the question. 

“It’s most likely they weren’t protected against magic. There wasn’t an electrical or magnetic interference, and there were enough networks that taking them all down at once would require someone as smart as, well, me, and I highly doubt that Dreadknight is really that smart.”

“Isn’t he a scientist?” Carol asked.

“Wrong flavor,” Tony said, trailing off as one of the screens distracted him. Carol managed to suppress the urge to fling her coffee mug as hard as she could through Tony’s face. After a full minute of Tony no longer talking to her, Carol cleared her throat. Naturally, Tony missed the hint.

“Tony, could you, possibly, give this one, small thing your full, undivided attention,” Carol said, gritting her teeth. Amazingly, Tony stopped what he was doing.

“Carol, this is what I do. I solve problems. Usually, that doesn’t involve talking to people while I solve them. This is a little more complex than hitting ‘increase resolution,’” Tony said. “I get that you’re on edge because this is your best friend, but could you please just calm down?”

Carol’s mug shattered in her hand. 

Fifteen minutes later, Carol was punching things. More specifically, the punching bag made of unstable molecules that Reed Richards had gifted the team. 

“I think the bag is close to talking,” Cap said from his position leaning against the wall.

“Tony is being dumb,” She said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I might know a thing or two about Tony Stark being hard headed,” Steve said drily. 

“Don’t want to talk,” Carol grunted as she delivered a combo that could level most buildings. “Want to hit things.”

“You know, as bull-headed as Tony can be, he usually uses correct grammar,” Cap said.

“Yeah, well, maybe he should spend less time writing the next American Novel and do something useful,” she grumbled. 

Cap looked at her. Carol sighed and stopped punching the bag.

“I hate your guilt superpower,” she said, scowling. “I wish I still didn’t remember that.”

“If you want to punch things some more, go right ahead,” Steve said. “It’s kind of our thing.”

Carol sighed. “I know he’s technically right, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t an ass and I don’t hate him.”

“I think that’s where most of us are with Tony,” Steve said, smiling. 

They settled into a silent familiar routine of punching things, and Carol wished she remembered the other times she had done this, because for a few minutes she almost forgot that Jess was gone. 

“Forty minutes into the workout, though, the jittery feeling returned despite the intense exercise. “I’m going to fly around and do actual useful things because Tony is officially taking too damn long.”

“Stay in contact with the tower,” Steve said. “And good luck. We’ll find her.”

“Yeah, well, I really, really hope we do,” Carol said as she felt her chest constrict. She hated Steve and his stupid magic perception.

“We’re just as much friends with Jess as you are,” Steve said, smiling his best Captain America smile. “Get going before you explode.”

Well, maybe not totally perceptive. Carol said thanks for small miracles as she flew off, because she definitely did not need the whole team knowing about that right now.


	5. We'll Always Have Madripoor

Jess felt a familiar sweltering soup descend on her as she slipped off of the cargo hold of the jet.

She hated humidity.

Maybe it was because she was raised in a metal coffin, which despite completely messing with her sense of what was and wasn’t cozy was also kept to a rather comfortable temperature and humidity. Maybe it was because she had spent too much time on the West Coast, were the only bearable climate in the whole world seemed to be. Maybe it was because it made her normally glorious hair feel like a sticky, sweaty mess no matter what she did. 

Most likely, however, it was because she was in fucking Madripoor, and of all the places in the world, it was the one she least wanted to taste every time she opened her mouth. 

She had used her pheromones to convince a cargo stowing person at the airport that she deserved the chance to stow away. At least the usual feeling that she was human garbage seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to how badly she had hurt everyone else in her life. It almost felt good, because it hurt her and she needed to feel pain right now. 

Which of course was why she was in Madripoor. If anywhere on Earth was adept at making its inhabitants feel like shit, it was here.

Also, because Lindsay was here. It was fitting, now that she thought about it.

Jess could have called ahead, but she didn’t know if it was possible to track the burner phones she had. They weren’t supposed to be traceable, but working with Black Widow had taught her nothing was truly untraceable.

Also, Jess hadn’t really put that much thought into this, if she was being honest.

Which is probably why she didn’t take too many pains to hide herself when she walked into Lindsay’s bar. She sat quietly in one of the back booths that practically screamed, “I’m being inconspicuous!”

Which is exactly why Lindsay, as a PI, was able to almost immediately spot her, and why only a few minutes later she was sliding into the seat opposite her. 

“Of all the Gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” Lindsay said, her lips a hard line across her face. “You could have just called, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessica said softly.

“Well, that’s always nice to hear,” Lindsay said, face softening. “Also, a little vague.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, because I pushed you away. And I realized that it was really my fault for trying to cling to something that didn’t exist,” she said. “So I came to say sorry for fucking up our friendship.”

“Oh, Jess,” Lindsay looked sadly at her, “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for forever. You always blame yourself for these things.”

“That’s because it’s kind of my fault a lot,” Jess said. “Great power and all that.”

“That’s the other, less hot spider person,” Lindsay said, smirking. “Besides, I think that it’s totally ok to let this one be in the past.”

Jess felt her throat catch. Barely above a whisper, so that maybe no one would hear her give in, she said, “Ok, I think I can do that.”

“Well that’s good to hear,” Lindsay said breezily as she sat back in her seat, all smiles. “It’s good to have you back Jessica.”

She was being so nice to her that Jess felt a little bad about flinching, but she covered well enough that Lindsay was good enough to pretend she didn’t notice.

They talked. They talked for hours, just like they used to. Jess tried to pretend that the seedy bar wasn’t in the hellhole of an island that it was and instead was the china town bar Lindsay had once dragged her to. 

By Lindsay’s third whiskey, Jess felt herself start to become entranced. She felt naïve, and young, and clean on the inside again, as if this was the second week Lindsay had been her roommate. She wanted Lindsay to be more than her roommate, but she only had the one friend and she didn’t want to be selfish. 

By the fifth whiskey, Lindsay was calling her Jessie again. She felt a little shiver of pleasure every time that she said it, like she could make this amazing woman who was going places happy. Like she could give pleasure to someone.

By the ninth whiskey, Lindsay cut herself off from the drinks, but kept drinking in the sight of Jessie’s fine features, her full chest, and delicate lips that should be on hers. Jessica sat up a little straighter and pushed her chest out a little, and maybe she bit her lip.

When Lindsay told Jessie that she wanted to show her the information she had gathered on the amulet, she knew what was coming.

If she were able to get drunk, she would have. It probably would have felt better too, but as it was, it still felt ok.

When they got into the room, Lindsay her up against the side wall and pulled her into a deep, dirty kiss. Jess whined as Lindsay pulled her head back hard by the hair, and started running her hands over Lindsay’s body. Lindsay moved down Jess’s exposed throat, sucking at the tender flesh with her tounge and lips, eliciting little gasps from Jess.

“Lindsay, you’re drunk,” Jess said, “Are you sure about this?”

“Jessie, we both knew what was going to happen the minute you walked into my bar,” Lindsay said. “I wouldn’t have had so many if I didn’t want this.”

Lindsay pushed Jess backwards onto the bed, and everything started to blur together. Lindsay’s hands were touching her, pulling her clothes off. Then Lindsay was lightly slapping her face as she rubbed in between Jess’s legs with her other hand. She remembered her face sliding down between Lindsay’s legs, licking in long strokes, trying to turn her on as much as she could. She felt Lindsay guide her head down between her legs, grab her hair, and hold her head firmly while she used her tongue to make her feel good.

Lindsay tasted exactly like she remembered, and it brought back memories of the first time she had done this to Lindsay. Of Lindsay walking into her room, taking her hand, gently tracing her jaw-line…

It was pretty clear to Jessica that the Lindsay from her first night wasn’t here. It was better this way. She could feel comfort for being pathetic while not making Lindsay feel bad. Not to brag, but she was pretty sure she was making Lindsay feel pretty good from the sounds she was making. 

Eventually, Jess was lying next to Lindsay naked in bed, the light sheen from their bodies beginning to wick away into the sheets. Lindsay’s breath was just returning when she started to kiss down Jess’s neck, down past her breasts, and Jess had to tell her, “Stop.”

“What?” asked Carol, perplexed, as she looked into Jess’s eyes. Jess gasped as she shoved herself back into the headboard, trying to get away. She closed her eyes, trying to get the image of Carol out of her head. Carol was dead. This was Lindsay.

Whom she had just done things with. 

She felt queasy, and thanked the fact that she hadn’t eaten in the past two days for not being able to throw up anymore.

“Jess? Jess, what’s wrong?” asked Lindsay, words slightly slurred. 

“Don’t touch me,” Jess whispered, curling up slightly. “Please don’t.”

“Why?” Lindsay asked. “I’ll make you feel good. I always do.”

“I don’t want…” Jess stopped herself from saying she didn’t want to feel good. “I don’t want to put you out.”

“Jess,” Lindsay said, giving her a look that told her she could entirely see through the bullshit.

“Lindsay, it’s… I’m sorry,” Jess said, realizing that she needed to leave. “This was a terrible idea.”

“Jessie, don’t go,” Lindsay whined, but Jess had sobriety and super strength on her sides, and easily kept Lindsay from interfering as she pushed her sweaty body back into her suit. It was starting to smell dank, and her fresh sweat rehydrated the old sweat. 

It smelled almost as disgusting as she felt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dammit Jess


	6. Paint It Black

Carol checked the room number one more time before she pushed the spare key into the once familiar doorframe of Jess’s apartment. The familiar smell of plaster dust filled her nose as she walked in.

She wondered when Jess would ever get to finish her wall. Carol still didn’t see why she couldn’t just hire a contractor. Carol knew she would have wanted to knock down the wall herself as well, but it would have taken maybe forty five seconds for her to do it. A full minute if she hadn’t had her coffee yet. 

Carol was snapped back to reality by a scuffing sound behind her. She whirled, charging herself up to blast… Black Widow. 

“I thought you would be here earlier,” Natasha said.

“I tried to talk to Tony about what happened,” Carol said. “He told me it was magic. And that I should go away.”

“Nice to know he’s feeling like himself,” Natasha said as she walked over to the sink and got a glass of water.

“Shouldn’t you wait until we look for evidence you start to moving things?” Carol asked, eyebrows raised. Natasha looked at her coolly as she sipped the water.

“You erased the tracks in the plaster when you walked in,” Natasha said. “I already searched this place twice. Nothing’s here.”

“That’s… disappointing,” Carol said.

“It says a great deal,” Natasha said. “It also says a great deal that it took you so long to get here.”

“Tony isn’t nearly as personable as you,” Carol grumbled. 

Widow raised an eyebrow. Carol scowled.

“What did you find out?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know anything about Jessica’s location in particular,” Natasha said. “But I heard about an artifact that was just put up for auction.”

“Doesn’t that happen a lot?” Carol asked, confused.

“I would imagine so,” Natasha said. “But this one is known for its powerful illusory magic. And more importantly, mind control.”

“So someone mind controlled Jess?” Carol asked.

“Maybe. But why would Dreadknight attack us? He had nothing to gain,” Widow said, “but obviously someone else did.”

“So then why did Jess leave?” Carol asked. “If she was attacked then she wouldn’t have just left her stuff there.”

“I don’t know,” Widow said. “Perhaps whoever is using it needed Dreadknight to get close to Jess to use it. Or maybe something else happened.”

“But who would do that and then sell the thing? Wouldn’t that lead us right to them? And wouldn’t it be really valuable?” Carol asked.

“They could have sold it anonymously to a distributor,” Natasha said. “The sellers are known for being middle men for more powerful clients, and Magical items have a habit of harming their owners. They likely didn’t want the heat of having it after kidnapping an avenger. There’s no hard evidence, but the timing is too close together to be a coincidence.”

“I hate magic,” Carol said.

“It is vexing,” Natasha agreed. “The sale is going to happen in Madripoor. I think that it would make sense for you to go there, especially given that Jess’ last call was from a Madripoor number.”

“Who does Jess know in Madripoor?” said Carol.

“A Lindsay McCabe,” Natasha said. “Do you know who she is? I don’t mean to be rude.”

“No, I do remember that name,” Carol said, forehead knitting together. Then she realized where she remembered it from. 

“I read it in her file,” Carol said. “She was Jess’ roommate in San Francisco, but Jess didn’t look happy when she… called…”

“It’s never good news when an old love calls,” Natasha said as she put on a slight smile that seemed like a grimace. 

“How did you know she liked girls?” Carol asked.

“Jess told me,” Natasha said. “And since they were ‘roommates’ and Lindsay didn’t follow her to New York, odds are they were together and it didn’t end well.”

“Right,” Carol said. “So I should definitely take a trip to Madripoor then.”

“I would say so,” Natasha said. “I’ll call ahead to Lindsay. Speed seems more important than stealth here. And you can fly faster than the quinjet.”

“I think you’re right,” Carol said. “Thank you, Natasha.”

As she turned to go out the door, Natasha said, “You know you can talk to me.”

Carol turned back to her.

“What is there to talk about?” Carol said.

“Well, you’re about to fly across the world guns blazing to rescue your girlfriend,” Natasha said, and she needed to stop figuring things out on her own. “But you seem upset. This seems like the classic Carol Danvers scenario to me.”

“That’s why I’m upset,” Carol said, shifting her weight to her other leg. “But shouldn’t I go as soon as possible?”

“It’s better to go in five minutes with a clear head than go now when you’re muddled,” Natasha said. “Don’t pretend you’re the only one who cares about her. I showed her where I get my gelato, you’re just dating. As such, it’s my job to make sure you don’t mess this up.”

“Fine. Jess said that I always play the hero. I didn’t believe her. And here I am, playing the hero again,” Carol said. “Which I have to do the hard way because I rushed in and tried to be the hero before and got my ass handed to me by a nobody and don’t remember anything about what happened. Which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t played hero earlier and lost all of my memory.”

“So you’re just realizing you might have a small savior complex,” Natasha said with the shadow of a smile. “You’re an official avenger now.”

Carol scowled and said, “Well I’m realizing this for the first time all over again. I just don’t like being quite so… wrong about something.”

“It’s come up before,” Natasha said. “You can fix this mistake. Find her.”

“It’s the fact that I have to,” Carol said. 

“All we can do is try to fix things,” Natasha said as her eyes grew darker. “We can’t change the past.”

“I guess you might have some experience with this,” Carol said ruefully.

“A little,” Natasha replied. “Now go get her. She’s important. She understands gelato.”

“I wouldn’t dream of changing the dynamics of the spider-spy support group,” Carol said. She turned and walked out the front door, and after a running start she jumped and flew westward into the setting sun. 

She had a pretty girl to save.


	7. Witches Brew

Jess had almost gotten out the door, but as always, circumstances forced her to overstay her welcome.

Jess was buttoning the last button on her shirt when the first grenade crashed through the window. She immediately threw herself to the nearest corner of the room and covered her ears with her hands, opening her mouth as a second flew through the window. The first grenade exploded a second later, shortly followed by the second. 

If she had the time to be grateful, she would have thanked her superhuman reflexes.

Jess immediately launched herself at the doorway, getting there as the first assailant’s gun appeared in the doorway. She slammed the barrel of the gun into his face hard enough to knock him out before shoving him back out the door with enough force to knock down anyone coming in the door behind him.

Jess saw that these were Hydra agents. They were probably working in two teams of four like they usually did. 

Twisting towards the other obvious entry point as she dove, the window, she fired a dazzlingly bright but low energy venom blast. The two men coming through the door yelled as their night vision goggles overloaded, and as they moved to rip them off Jess easily dispatched them with venom blasts. 

Jess jumped through the drywall and into the hallway, plowing into another armed man in the hallway. Grabbing his front she shoved him back into the three other men in the hallway, knocking them over for a second time. She finished off the two conscious agents with her venom blasts before running back into Lindsay’s apartment.

Gliding a foot off the ground as dove through the door, she hit the two remaining hydra troopers in the room with venom blasts before they could train their guns down to the floor. Jess pulled up sharply into a stall landed on her feet as the hydra agents fell to the floor. 

“Jess?” Lindsay called out from the other room. She swayed in the doorframe, disoriented from the flashbangs and vodka.

“Lindsay,” Jess said as she walked over to her after a quick scan of the room showed no one who was a threat was still conscious. Gently, Jess guided her back to bed. As she propped Lindsay up on her side and helped clean up the mess she had created, she realized, great detective that she was, that there was a common element to all the things that had been happening to her recently… and not particularly recently. It was her. Jessica Drew was the problem. 

Her anger at Lindsay had created the distance between them. Her carelessness and rage had gotten Carol killed. And her incredibly stupid decision to come here had nearly gotten another person close to her killed.

Jess wiped her brow. She was so tired the effort caused her whole body to ache. 

She realized that she had run out of places to run to, and friends to hurt. She needed to leave, but she wondered where she would go.

She could try to take out Madame Viper. She knew she had a base here in Madripoor. Normally she wouldn’t even think of attacking something so heavily fortified alone, but if she wasn’t looking to come back out, then she had a decent chance of getting in far enough to get to her. She must have been the one to send these goons, and even if she didn’t know how, she was probably responsible for killing Carol. 

Her finger prints were all over it. This case had Jess hating herself in a personal way that only Viper was able to point out in her. Maybe she was using the magic device Lindsay had been talking about. She was the only one who made sense… 

Jess shook her muddled head as her curiosity as to how Viper could have possibly known she was here, now, made her stop to think. Even the avengers didn’t know she was here, and they had Black Widow with them. Unless Lindsay had drunk the Kool-Aid while she was away, Viper couldn’t have known she was here.

Now that she was looking more carefully, she stooped to remove the mask from one of the Hydra troopers when she noticed a tiny glint of light coming from underneath the busted night vision goggles. His eyelids emitted a faint glow. She pulled up the unconscious man’s eyelid and found an angry red triquetra glowing back at her in the pupil of his eye.

She let his eyelid slip back down. After dropping the men off at the Madripoor police station, she texted what she had learned to a number she knew would get to Widow in a while. She also said goodbye. 

She had almost done everything she could. Now she needed to do the last thing she could, and the thing she was best at.

Because even if she was clever, and even if could help find out who did this to Carol, she was still toxic. She was a killer. And she couldn’t get any more innocent blood on her hands, even though her suit was already stained deep crimson. The best she could hope for was to hope that she could wash herself clean with blood as guilty as sin itself.

She took a shower, washed out the inside of her suit, and took a few sleeping pills and ate a few bites of something before curling up on a rooftop with a sheet she stole from Lindsay. She needed the rest, no matter how much she hated delaying this. 

She would be rested and ready for her only blaze of glory. 

 

Lindsay McCabe opened her eyes. And then she promptly vomited into the trash can next to her bed.

She held her head and groaned; the burning in her throat secondary to the strained feeling in her chest. She rolled clumsily out of bed, knowing she needed to get to the sink to get some water or her hangover was going to be ten times worse in the morning. 

Then she saw the light filtering in through the window and realized that it was, in fact, morning, and the gods of Alcohol had come for their pound of flesh. 

She could barely remember the last time she had gotten this blitzed. It had been a lifetime ago, on a different continent…

She was stirred from her thoughts when she tripped over a gun. A gun with a green insignia on it. The insane night she had had came back to her in a painful rush, like a baseball bat of poor decisions to the face.

She realized she needed to call Jess. And maybe take a shower. And definitely never drink again (she knew she would anyway).

Then her phone rang and nearly took her head off with the volume. She lunged for it to answer just to make the mind-wrenching beeping stop.

“Hello?” she remembered to say. Maybe she wasn’t as hungover as she thought, she could answer a phone.

“Hello, this is Captain Marvel,” came an authoritative female voice from over the line. Lindsay fumbled the phone before recovering it.

“Like, from the Avengers?” she said stupidly. 

“Yes, the famous Captain Marvel, not the one who does parties,” said the slightly terse voice over the phone. She could tell she was making an excellent impression so far.

“Are you calling about Jess?” she asked, hoping to sound less stupid.

“Yeah,” Captain Marvel said. “Did she tell you anything about where she was going or what she was doing? Have you seen her recently?”

“Yeah, she was here last night,” Lindsay said, pinching her nose in concentration.

“She was? Is she still there? Is she alright? Where did she go?” Carol said forcefully.

“One question at a time,” she said, pulling the phone away from her ear a little. 

“Sorry,” she said. “Is she ok?”

“She was fine the last time I saw her,” Lindsay said. “She brought a few Hydra friends to my apartment and kicked them around pretty thoroughly. Although she could have spared my drywall…”

“Is she there now?” Carol asked.

“No,” Lindsay said. “She left afterwards. I don’t know where she is. I don’t see a note or anything. She’s… she gets like this.”

“What do you mean ‘she gets like this’?” Carol said icily.

“You know. Moody. Won’t talk to anyone. Martyr-y,” she said. “Maybe I’m not explaining it well. I think she’s going after the Amulet though.”

“What Amulet?” Carol said.

“The… thingy, you know, that I told her about? Didn’t she tell you?” Lindsay said.

“No. Is it perhaps a magic Amulet that casts illusions?” Carol said with realization in her voice.

“Yeah, it is,” she said. “It’s here in Madripoor. That’s why I think Jess is going after it.”

“Thanks. Do you have anything else on the Amulet?” Carol asked.

“Yeah, I have a file on my computer. I can send it over to New York of you want,” she said, pouring herself a glass of water, finally having made it to the sink.

“It’s fine, I’ll be at your apartment in two minutes,” Carol said, and hung up.

Lindsay realized she was going to be hungover, sweaty and generally gross when she met maybe the most powerful woman in the world. 

Twenty seconds after this realization, she realized that Captain Marvel had reacted a little strange for just a friend of Jess. And that she was tall. And Blonde. And that there was maybe something between her and Jess. And that she had just had bad drunk sex with Jess.

She chugged her water desperately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is so late, I had a lot of life happen. And not life I could procrastinate on like finals, or unimportant things like studying. Important things.


	8. Angel Witch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm late but this is a doubly long chapter, so I hope those balance out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are suicidal thoughts and actions in this chapter, so heads up

Jessica wiped the blood from her forehead out of her eyes as she caught her breath behind an over turned desk. She wondered to herself if she was doing too well for this to be a true blaze of glory. Clearing her head of clutter, she focused on her plan for vengeance.

She’d walked into the lobby of the Hydra skyscraper easily enough, and had even politely waited for the receptionist to call the kill team before she started tossing the cheap furniture around the room. In the confusion, she had escaped into the ventilation system of the building, which Hydra had conveniently made Jess-sized. Ever since she had been popping out to throw a few punches and trash a few rooms every few minutes before moving back to her hiding place. 

She figured that in the last hour that she had been doing this; someone had probably figured out what she was doing. Hydra had taught her how to do exactly this sort of thing, after all, and the guards we’re starting to show up in places that were increasingly annoying and surprising. 

Which was how the laser that had nearly taken her head off. She laughed out loud when she thought of how surprised the guard had looked after he realized the spray of blood was a flesh wound and that he had no chance as she pulled back for a punch. 

Jess decided that the time was ripe to finish her plan.

Using her super human strength, she threw the desk through the nearby window, flying out into the Madripoor night through the shower of glass. 

Jessica Drew felt herself lift and glide for what she knew was her last time. 

As she spent the three minute’s rising to the top floor, she tried to focus on her rage. She thought she would feel scared this close to the end. To her chagrin, she mostly felt distracted. 

Her mind wandered for the millionth time to the red glowing eyes of the Hydra troopers. It made sense that Viper would go to any means to get her, including using magical items. But while this base wasn’t exactly a daycare, it was definitely not on the high alert that she would have expected if Viper was here and looking for new ways to kill her.

Even the attack at Lindsay’s apartment didn’t really fit the picture, since the Hydra operatives had been trying to kill her, not capture her, which was Viper’s usual goal. 

Putting her thoughts aside, she focused on getting up enough speed to punch through the window into what she assumed was the shortest path to the command room.

She burst through the window in an explosion of glass. She glanced up.

Whoever was commanding the Hydra troopers hadn’t figured out the air duct trick. They had, however, made sure the command room had almost every trooper in the building defending it. Jess laughed at the cosmic joke as she launched herself at them. 

In the desperate fight, one punch quickly blurred into the next. She couldn’t afford to waste any energy on venom blasts, so it was purely using the same fighting techniques that Hydra had taught her and forced her to perfect in a lifetime of violence that she used against them. Normally she tried her best to do as little damage as possible, but there were so many guards that she had to simply try to incapacitate as many as quickly as she could if she wanted to make it to the command room.

She was slowly drawn out of her red tinged glaze when she heard screaming. She thought some of it could have been her, but she couldn’t really be sure. At one point she heard the steady rhythm of a heavy machine gun being fired. The Hydra troopers she was fighting were so close together many of the bullets passed through two or three troopers at a time as the machine gunner tried to hit her. 

She felt a bee sting, but ignored it and kept moving, until all she saw was red. 

She slowly regained control of her sight, and her breathing, as the red slowly faded from her vision. She saw that she was in a dark place, but she didn’t exactly know where, and that she was hanging upside down. She felt stickiness on her leg, and realized she had been shot. After taking account of the rest of her body, she felt several other places she assumed had been grazed by bullets.

By some miracle only one bullet that had directly hit anything more vital than her thigh muscle, but with the bleeding and pain it wasn’t a great comfort. She shifted to support more of her weight with her torso so she could relieve the ache in her thigh as she tried to figure out where she had ended up when she nearly gasped in revelation.

Maybe it was some combination of the pain clearing her head or the fact that she was thinking deductively made everything click.

Morgan le Fay was back from the grave and trying to destroy her as completely as she could.

She reviewed the evidence. The Hydra squad had triquetra, a magical symbol, in their eyes and knew exactly where she was like there were being guided straight to her. The person guiding them would either have to be better equipped to track her down than SHEILD and the Avengers or magic was involved. 

Additionally, it would take a very powerful magician who was very angry with her to do something like this. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense that it was Morgan behind everything. It was blindingly obvious, in fact. 

And now that she thought about it, when she had killed Carol, Dreadknight had been acting strangely by starting a fight he knew he couldn’t win. Maybe he had been controlled too.

But she could figure out how Morgan was trying to kill her from the grave and how to put her back and just what she was going to do after she got out of this mess.

First she had to figure out where she was. Her eyes had finally adjusted, and she could see an expanse of squares a foot from her face. She had climbed into the ceiling tiles. Was she in the same room as before?

The tile five down from her, next to the wall, exploded in a loud cloud of dust, stinging her eyes and filling her throat with dust. Startled, she started crawling as fast as she could to the wall furthest from where the tile had exploded, the one next to it exploded next. 

Every few seconds another tile exploded, creeping towards her with methodical malice. 

She needed to move faster, but chancing a glide with her injuries and in the extremely limited space would be an excellent way to tell them exactly where she was after she inevitably crashed. Gritting her teeth, she crawled faster away from the advancing line of exploding tiles, but they were gaining on her in the cramped space. 

As the dust approached, she realized she was going to have to cross over the line of fire if she wanted to be able to come out of place that didn’t have a gun trained at it. Waiting until the square just behind her exploded, Jessica leaped backward with all her might over the square that was about to be shot. 

The hail of bullets missed her leg as she sailed past, but hit the pipe above it filled with boiling hot water. The steam shot out in a jet, catching Jessica’s foot. Her suit was rated for some thermal insulation, but the steam easily overwhelmed it. Catching ahold of cold water pipes, she steadied herself as she screamed in her head until she thought she would explode. The pain was white hot, and with her adrenaline reserves completely burnt out she felt every bit of it. 

Gingerly, she pulled off her boot, nearly screaming again. The foot was red and swollen, and blistered in some places, but it was barely a second degree burn. She knew, she had seen worse. But walking on it, let alone fighting on it, would be a painful challenge. 

She checked the progress of the Hydra troopers trying to sweep her out. They had progressed to the last several rows. She had to make her move now if she wanted any surprise.

Pushing through the perforated ceiling tile below her, she came into view of the room again. Hoping she wasn’t too blinded by the change in the light, she fired her last reserves of energy at the troopers sweeping the room blindly, briefly throwing them into enough confusion for her to dive hard, leveling off a foot off the floor. 

Normally even a high G maneuver like this wouldn’t have been too much work for her, but her entire body screamed at her. She felt her leg stiffen up, and she couldn’t bend it correctly to balance, so she awkwardly bled off some speed when her burned foot hit the floor and slapped against a few of the bodies strewn across the ground. She screamed in pain but held her course, arms held in front of her as much as her leg would let her.

The troopers were well trained, and the second that it took for her to fly to the window was enough of a time to start firing at her again. Bullets kicked up around her, and it was only a matter of milliseconds before they would get a bead on her.

That’s when things stopped going to plan. Her foot, which she had been barely keeping above the debris of the floor, snagged on something, flipping her head into the floor and her feet into the air. Instead of gracefully punching through the window, which would have only hurt a little, she was hurled bodily into the reinforced plate glass. 

Jess felt the wind get knocked out of her as she crashed through the glass. She couldn’t tell if she broke any ribs, but her back hurt and she could tell something was terribly wrong. She could tell it would take weeks to heal properly under the best circumstances, even with her healing factor. 

To add to her problems, breaking the window with her back also left her arm wings exposed to the sharp glass as she went through. After falling a story and trying to open her wings, she realized the right one was in tatters, and the left was only marginally better. 

She really needed to stop jumping off buildings in Madripoor.

Uninjured, she had been able to survive a fall from this tower without her suit. But with a gimp leg, maybe broken ribs, and a foot that hurt a surprisingly huge amount as she fell through the air, she didn’t really like her chances. 

She went spread eagle, to try to use her body to at least slow her fall. She kept slowing down enough that her left wing would start to act as an airfoil, but without her right she simply flipped over in the air, picking up speed as she fell.

She heard the distant chatter of machine guns, but she wasn’t particularly worried about getting hit by a bullet. It would only be a slightly faster way to die than splattering over the ground, and was definitely something she had less control over. 

She saw the face of Morgan le Fay in the sky with her, but if she was honest she couldn’t see that well as she nauseatingly flipped over and over as she fell to earth.

“I’ve won, Jessica,” Morgan cackled. “You foolish girl! Did you really think you could kill the greatest sorceress to ever live? I’ve taken all that you love, and the best part is you’ve destroyed yourself!”

Jessica realized she needed to do something dangerous and stupid. Well, stupider.

She tucked herself into a ball, gaining speed, but regaining her bearings. Once she had them, she concentrated on her innate flight abilities the skrulls had given her and pushed herself towards the building so hard, that she could start to see black at the edge of her vision from pure exhaustion. 

She tried to stick to a window, but her bioelectricity was so weak from exhaustion that she was burning her gloves and boots with the attempt. So he hit a window with her fist, shattered it, and tried to grab onto the ledge as she fell.

Suddenly the erratic updraft that had thus far kept her from reaching terminal velocity dropped out from under her. Her hands slammed into the edge and it felt like her arms had been pulled out of her sockets as her hands slipped off, but she could still move them, so she spread her arms again despite the pain.

She was quickly running out of building to save herself with. Going back to trying to fly desperately as she panicked, she realized as she flipped over again that she had a way to stay level.

Righting herself, she managed to get into a glide by flying with her left arm and keeping herself level by sticking to the building with her right hand. It worked, but only for about three stories, before the combination of losing too much glove insulation as it skimmed the surface for it to not burn her hand off and her reaching the end of the building ended it. 

She had bled off a considerable amount of speed, but she still had another three stories to fall. As Jess sailed over the busy street, she realized she was probably going to die from this. She smiled. She had always known that this was how it was going to be. It was good that she was alone.

And then the updraft buffeted her up again.

It was one of the strongest winds she had ever felt, and while it didn’t stop her fall, it slowed her significantly. She fell another twenty feet before managing to almost stall, violently flipping herself and bleeding off speed before falling the rest of the height into a car.

She had been aiming for this car as she had been falling. It was a sports car with the top up, and when she hit the roof she tore through the cover with the front of her body, saving her back from the impact. She hit the backseat hard, but given her super strength she knew it wasn’t that bad.

But she still knew she was dead. The fall definitely wasn’t going to kill her, and she didn’t even feel badly injured other than the slight exacerbation of her wounds as she lay crumpled in the car. But she was badly beaten up enough that she was going to pass out. Maybe the blood loss would get her. 

But even if she survived, she would be admitted to the hospital, it wouldn’t be that hard for Morgan to kill her through anybody she wanted to. 

She saw Carol flying down to her, and she had her hand on her mouth. Jess smiled and giggled a little, giddy for the chance to finally get to see her again, before completely losing consciousness. 

She was going to have a long conversation with her, she could feel it.


	9. A Witch in Time

Jess woke up thrashing. She immediately sensed danger and scrambled into a crouch. Shooting pain lanced up her leg from her foot to her thigh, but she was on auto pilot as she leapt to the ceiling with her non-injured leg. 

She felt a little tug on her arm as she stuck to the ceiling. She scanned the room as quickly as she could to find the threat.

“Um, good morning,” Carol said, looking a little surprised from the chair that she was sitting in next to the hospital bed Jess had been in. She was a Delusion, a distraction. Jess ignored her. She scanned the room and didn’t see anyone else, so it had to be something else.

“Jess? You’re ok,” Carol said. “I just took you to the hospital.”

It was the smell. There was a smell that meant she was in danger. Concentrating, she sniffed lightly, and it registered: she smelled antiseptic. Just normal, non-dangerous antiseptic. 

She just needed a week or two to slow down her heart rate after she smelled it.

“Jess? Can you hear me?” Carol asked. Jess spent a few minutes stalk still, focusing on her breathing. The Carol delusion really was distracting, but she was getting feeling back. She looked down to her arm and realized that she had ripped out a saline drip from her arm, and blood was dripping from her arm onto her hospital gown and the floor. She wondered why she wasn’t dead yet.

“Jess? I’m not an illusion,” Carol said. “I know about the amulet.”

Jess climbed down from the ceiling, slowly and painfully, trying to keep from ripping any of the stitches in her leg. She curled into a loose fetal position with her back to the wall as she tried to recover from the effort. With the adrenaline of waking up gone, she felt drained again.

Carol got up slowly and smoothly, looking like she had just found a cat that she didn’t want to scare away. She got down into a low crouch and slowly started towards her. She started to slowly put her hand towards her.

Jess wondered if this was a delusion of something that would kill her, and she shrank away from Carol’s outstretched hand. Carol looked hurt and withdrew it, and sat back on haunches. Jess realized that she needed to get out of the room, but she would be a little too conspicuous with her hospital gown.

She wondered if she could knock out a nurse or doctor that came in. But how to lure them in?

“Jess,” Carol said softly, and Jess had to escape before she could cry, but she just felt so tired and Carol sounded so real. “Jess, what happened to you?”

And Carol asking what had happened to her was what did it. Jess started twitching at the shoulders, which became shudders almost without her noticing. It hurt, a lot, to have wracking sobs move her entire body, but she couldn’t stop, so she curled into as a tight of a ball as she could. 

She imagined she felt Carol’s warm hand on her shoulder again, gently touching her and giving her something to focus on. She heard Carol sit next to her and started petting her hair as gently as the real Carol, and she felt even her weak veneer of control fall away. She didn’t know for how long she cried.

“Jess,” Carol said again, as softly as she had ever heard her say anything. “You’re ok now. You’re ok.”

Jess’s curiosity came over her. Morgan’s illusions always looked, sounded and smelled, real, but they always felt… cold. Wrong. Once she was looking for it, she could always tell how it wasn’t right. 

But this Carol was warm. It must just be making her feel warm where it was touching her, a psychosomatic memory triggered by the sight and sound of Carol.

Her curiosity cut through her grief. She cocked her head to the side as she hesitantly reached out for Carol’s knee. She touched it, and when she realized that it was as warm as Carol was, just like her hands, and her body, she realized that this couldn’t be an illusion. 

She pulled back her hand like it was bitten and shied away from Carol, who was now frozen and making a reassuring face.

“Carol?” was all that she could get out. It came out croaked and cracked and ugly, but Carol’s entire face lit up. Jess felt her stomach flip.

“Jess?” Carol said hopefully, moving to envelop Jess in a hug. Jess gently pushed away from her to stop it. 

“Jess, I just want to hug you,” Carol said, looking hurt. 

“Carol, why would you?” Jess asked. She had put it far less bluntly in her head.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Carol asked, eyebrow raised.

“How are you alive?” Jess said. 

“Maybe we should start earlier,” Carol said gently. “I know what happened the night we fought Dreadknight up until I was knocked out. What happened after that?”

“I dropped you on the rooftop, and Dreadknight learned that I have immunity to toxins very painfully,” Jess said and then shifted uncomfortably.

“And then?” Carol asked.

“There’s something that’s been happening to me… I know why now, I think…” Jess said, looking at anything but Carol.

“And that thing is?” Carol asked, voice warm but very inch of her body focused on Jessica like a laser.

“Carol, don’t hate me for not telling you this earlier, but I’ve been having these visions,” Jess said. “I see things that aren’t there, like Veranke laughing at me with my face, or my skin turning green. And I had one on the building.”

“Jess, why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” Carol said.

“I should have. But you were back from space,” Jess said, looking downcast. “And I couldn’t drop this on you when you were out there, and finding yourself. I didn’t want to be some crazy girl that you had to be friends with. Because I didn’t think you’d ever come back…”

“That I’d ever come back?” Carol said. Jess took a shaky breath.

“That you would ever come back to me if you knew I was as fucked up as I am. I mean, I know it’s too late now, but I wanted it,” she said.

“Jess,” Carol said, eyes softening. “I would come back to you if I had to push my spaceship from one end of this galaxy to the other myself.”

“But you didn’t know me, Carol,” Jess said, sounding desperate. “It was the only way to get you back.”

“Jess, I would have come back to get to know you even if I didn’t know that I had been your girlfriend before,” Carol said. “You’re kind of an interesting person to get to know.”

Jess wanted to say something cool in response, but instead just blushed and managed, “You’re cool too.”

“Also, where else was I going to find a bigger dork than me?” Carol said, grinning. “What did you do on the building when you thought I was a skrull?” 

“I tried to kill you,” Jess whispered.

There was an awkward silence that hung between them for far too many seconds.

“And how did that go?” Carol said with an eyebrow raised.

“I mean, you tell me,” Jess said morosely, and Carol laughed. “Carol, this isn’t funny.”

“It’s a little funny,” Carol said.

“You’re girlfriend just told you that she committed attempted murder, against you, and you think it’s funny?” Jess asked.

“Jess, you weren’t trying to kill me, you were trying to kill a skrull impersonating me,” Carol said. “Besides, you did such a bad job.”

“I threw you off a building,” Jess said, floundering.

“And I’d be mad if you did that again, but given the circumstances, I can’t really blame you for that. The causing this is probably an amulet that someone used to cause you to hallucinate,” Carol said, pausing for Jess to nod. “Mind control doesn’t count. It’s like superhero bro code, except, you know, less awful. No, I think I get to be a lot madder about all the stuff that happened after that. I talked with Lindsay.”

“Oh,” Jess said.

“Yeah,” Carol said with notably less humor. “So why was the first thing you do after you think I die to jump on your first girlfriend?” 

“I wanted to hate myself so much that I would be able to kill myself,” Jess said quietly. Jess hated how she could see Carol’s heart break when she said it, and she wished briefly that she had gone through with it. And then she thought about what Carol’s face would look like if she had actually succeeded, and her heart broke all over again. 

So when Carol wrapped her in her arms, and pulled her tight, she let her. 

It hurt, to be honest. Her back felt like a continuous bruise. Her shoulder joints were swollen and pained with the effort of holding herself up on the ceiling after her fall. And her knee was digging into the linoleum because she had to keep her bandaged and burned foot off the ground.

But feeling Carol, smelling Carol, and holding Carol while knowing that Carol still cared about her was more than enough to make the pain ebb away into the background, at least for the five minutes that Carol held the hug. And even though she knew that Carol would move on after her, she felt good knowing that she hadn’t completely broken their friendship.

“My girlfriend is not allowed to die,” Carol said into the nape of Jess’ neck. Her… girlfriend?

“Jessica Miriam Drew, you do not get to leave me, and you do not get to check out early,” she said. “You do good in the world. I don’t care what bad thing you did or think you did, there is always a way you can make it better, even if you can’t fix it.”

“You’ve been talking to Nat, haven’t you?” Jess said.

“Maybe,” Carol said. “But she has a point.”

“Yes,” Jess said. “Yes, she does.”

They sat in silence for at least a full minute, maybe more.

“Carol?” Jess said.

“Yeah?” Carol said.

“Can we move to a more comfortable position?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Carol said. Carefully, Jess sat against the wall, and then leaned over and rested her head on Carol’s shoulder. Because Carol was sitting next to her, and still let her do things like this, and Carol might be fine with so much more affection right now but this was the most Jess could give without feeling like garbage.

Everything in Jessica’s body ached. She thought to all the times that she had fantasized about letting the pain end, letting the self-loathing peter into nothing because there wouldn’t be anything to loathe anymore. She thought of all the times she had been scared numb after waking up screaming because the most comforting thing she could think of was that she always had the option to stop herself from waking up screaming ever again.

She thought of all the nights she had spent awake when she should have been sleeping, ostensibly to foil evil but secretly wanting to validate any of the pain she knew she had caused as a small mistake on the way to drowning it out with good.

But it was never going to be enough.

Jess smiled.

And she realized that she could have died in the Hydra tower. She had set up all the conditions perfectly, and the one’s she hadn’t Morgan made sure to supply. She had been in the perfect position to finally make it all end.

But she chose not to.

Jess snuggled into Carol, and felt Carol start petting her hair again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I'm a garbage monster that adds extra chapters but the last one just kept going and going


	10. Spirited Away

After spending a good twenty minutes the next day convincing Carol that she was ready to move to a motel room, even if she was still sore, Jess and Carol had quietly checked into a tiny cockroach palace in a secluded corner of the city.

“You know, this place charges hourly,” Carol said, eying the bed distrustfully.

“They also take obviously fake names, Harriet Quimby,” Jess said.

“At least I had the decency to pick an obscure reference, Nancy,” Carol said. “You didn’t even change your last name.”

“It’s clever, shut up,” Jess said. “Besides, we only need the cover for a few days.”

“Fair enough,” Carol said. 

“So now that we’re here, we can talk,” Jess said. “I think I figured out everything that happened now that you’ve told me what you know.”

“Please share for the terribly confused,” Carol said. “Although it’s nice to be confused by things that are actually confusing and not by my stupid memory.”

“You really need to stop losing all your memories,” Jess said with a small frown, gently squeezing Carol’s arm. “Ok, so, once a very long time ago, I may have met Morgan le Fay, and she tried to kill me. A lot. I may have killed her back a little bit after she tried to conquer reality.”

“I see,” Carol said. “None of that really made sense, but I’m rolling with it.”

“Apparently I didn’t kill her all the way, because my venom blast targets biological systems primarily,” Jess said. “I have to release a lot of energy for the secondary effects to disrupt non-organic material. So while I toasted Morgan le Fay’s body, I didn’t destroy her Amulet, which was recently discovered.”

“I see,” Carol said. “But if she’s dead, then how does she use her amulet?”

“When I destroyed her body, her soul and consciousness weren’t in her body,” Jess said. “I think when she realized she was going to die, she put part of herself in the Amulet.”

“So a crazy lady from the middle ages trapped in a mystical realm is using a Medallion to try to kill you,” Carol said. “Check. But why wait so long? Why not get someone to kill you when you were a baby, being a time traveler and all?”

“I don’t know,” Jess said. “I would guess because she’s weak in some way. She used to be able to cast illusions and mind control people through time, but now she seems to be limited by temporal space when she’s doing things in the physical plane. Maybe there’s an area of influence, and when it was buried there was no one around to influence, but now that it’s been discovered there are plenty of people to control.” 

“That would make sense,” Carol said. “Also, how do you know this much about magic?”

“I had a creepy fake uncle that possessed my father when I was a child for several years, and then lived with me for a year when I was on the run, then tried to get in my pants after I helped him beat Morgan by emotionally manipulating me into staying with him in the astral plane,” Jess said. “Amazingly, he was still a better dad than my real father. He also knew a lot of magic.”

“That’s… that’s some messed up shit,” Carol said. 

“I haven’t had great luck with dads,” Jess said.

“I would say it’s weird, but I read that I married my son once,” Carol said. “The whole thing seemed so absurd that I was ninety percent sure it was a joke Tony slipped in there until I brought it up and everyone tried to avoid the subject.”

“No, no that happened,” Jessica said. “It was… weird. But I got to meet you, so that was cool.”

“I’m so glad that is not how I remember meeting you,” Carol said.

“It’s for the best,” Jess said. “I accidently grabbed your boob like three times when I was trying to swim with you back to shore after you fell off a bridge.”

“We seem to meet each other in really awkward ways, don’t we?” Carol asked.

“Yeah. Yeah we do,” Jess said. Carol stepped close to her and took Jess’ hand in hers, and Jess tried to let what was happening happen like it had been. She was ready for it to just be a happy ending and for it to be over.

But it still felt wrong for Carol to show her affection. It didn’t feel as wrong as it had at the hospital, though, and Jessica was glad for that. 

But she realized that this hurt, and that because she was hurt it was probably going to upset Carol and there was no way to avoid that, which sucked. She realized that she still felt guilty, despite what Carol had said. Finally, she realized that this was going to take a while to get over, and she was going to wake up screaming a lot before that happened.

But she also knew she had a way to get to being ok. That was what mattered. 

“Jess, are you ok?” Carol asked, noticing that Jess wasn’t there before Jess did.

“No. I’m tired and I’m out of sorts, and I’m not going to be ok for a while,” Jess said. “But I’m going to get there, eventually. And for now, I think that I’m going to try to get used to holding your hand.”

Carol smiled and said, “I want to get used to holding your hand again too.”

“Also I just realized we should probably tell everyone that I’m not dead or trapped in a hell dimension or anything,” Jess said.

“That seems smart,” Carol said. “And I know just the person to call.”

Natasha picked up on the third ring.

“Carol, what’s going on? You haven’t called in over a day,” Natasha said.

“I found Jess,” Carol said. “She’s all right. Nothing a few days of rest won’t fix.”

“And all the therapy,” Jess muttered.

“Where did you find her?” Natasha asked.

“Falling out of the Hydra tower in Madripoor,” Carol said.

“She does that,” Natasha said, and Carol could swear she heard the frown over the phone.

“So I’ve heard,” Carol said. “I can tell you all the details later, but basically Morgan le Fay is messing with things again, and she’s using the amulet you told me about to do it. We think.”

“I see,” Natasha said. “I’ll call Dr. Strange and send you the information on the auction so you can get it and destroy it. Good hunting.”

“Thanks,” Carol said. Tapping her helmet to end the call, she turned to Jess.

“So how are we supposed to get the amulet without getting mind-controlled if it works on an area of influence?” Carol asked. 

“I have a plan,” Jess said.  
\---------  
Jess looked down from her perch on the ceiling and was seriously reconsidering her plan.

It had seemed significantly less suicidal when she was in motel room, and not sitting above a guest hall of dozens of super villains waiting to bid on an artifact that could mind control any one of them. Jess really, really hoped this worked.

She closed her eyes and relaxed. It always felt gross to do this, and now she was doing it above a giant crowd of people. But dumping pheromones over everyone in attendance was pretty much the only way this was going to work, so she relaxed her muscles and let it spill out.

She waited in the wings for over twenty minutes before the auction started just to make sure the air would be totally saturated by the time of the auction. 

The first thing for sale was a bunch of Stark Tech knock-off pulse rifles. She would have to tell Tony about this. Then came a bunch of other boring, uninteresting junk that Jess was sure could level houses but was also super tedious. 

Fortunately, this was far from her first stake out, so she was alert when the amulet came up for auction. 

She silently glided down on silent wings, picking up speed as she dove, a tow cable trailing behind her attached to the karabiner in her hand.

When the first people in the crowd spotted her, instead of immediately shooting her like they normally would, they stared at her with their jaws on the floor. She imagined that if they were talking to her they would tell her something along the lines of how she was the most compelling creature they had ever seen or some such coerced nonsense that would eat away at her over the next few of weeks.

Having them not talk was a really good part of this plan.

Once people started standing up, Jess noticed that a few of the people in the front rows started to have red triquetras appear in their eyes. Once they did, they immediately moved to try to attack her, but most of the back rows moved to stop them almost immediately, and pandemonium broke out among the bidders. 

Jess focused on Snagging the Amulet.

Hoping that Magnus’ protection spell from all those years ago still worked on her, she opened the Karabiner and grabbed the Amulet. It sent a cold chill up her spine to touch it, like she was screaming alone into a dark room but no one could hear me. Quickly securing the necklace to the karabiner, she let go of it and rolled behind the podium.

“Carol, you can take off now,” Jess said into her ear piece.

“See you back in a few hours,” Carol said wistfully. Jess saw the Amulet immediately jerk up through the small hole in the ceiling they had cut for just this purpose as Carol took off into the Madripoorian skies. 

In the chaos and confusion of the battle raging around her, it wasn’t hard for Jess to sneak out of the auction room.

Carol was going to fly the amulet on the end of the tow cable, far enough away so that Morgan couldn’t affect her, to Dr. Strange so that it could be neutralized. Jess was going to wait for Natasha to get to Madripoor with the quinjet to take her back to New York, because she really needed to tell her what happened in person. 

And buy Natasha gelato for basically being the best. She was going to need lots and lots of gelato.


	11. Night Witches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I finally finished it oh my god what took me so long.

As soon as Jess walked through the door of Carol’s apartment, she wanted to be ready. She had thought about this so many times when Carol was gone, how much she wanted to touch her and be touched by her. She wanted to able to love Carol completely again.

It had been a week since Madripoor. She had more or less been in an exhaustion coma for the first two days back, even with her healing factor. After that came the day of perpetual apologies, and then a mental health day with Carol. 

They went to tiny boardwalk on the coast. There were Carol smirks and stupid Ferris Wheel rides even though they could both fly and cotton candy flavored kisses. It was nice, and no one tried to kill anyone.

Then came an oddly boring Thursday. She talked to bored looking middle schoolers about not doing drugs, which she found pretty ironic, considering she wouldn’t be telling kids to not do drugs if she hadn’t been pumped full of drugs as a kid. There was only one person who asked her if she was the skrull queen during questions, which was better than the last one of these things Steve had made her do.

Friday had been magical. She and Carol had blown up a bunch of things in Upstate New York. She had zapped some people, seen her girlfriend make Avengering look easy and gotten the banter back up to its usual level.

It felt as normal as Jess felt comfortable feeling. 

So when the door closed behind her after she went with Carol to her apartment after, she took Carol’s hand in hers and pulled her close enough that she could smell her shampoo and conditioner and most importantly, Carol’s smell. 

It always relaxed her, finding Carol underneath whatever other smells we’re over it, trying to mask it. But when she concentrated, she could always smell her scent when she was pressed up against her soft skin. It was the best smell in the world, and it had been forever since she had experienced it this closely. Carol locked eyes with her and kissed her, lightly at first, but eventually shoving her tongue deeply into Jess’ mouth, and occasionally inviting Jess’ tongue into hers. 

Jess felt Carol press her gently against the door, and she licked down to Carol’s neck, kissed her way down to her collar bone, and pushed her tongue into the every crevice and curve she found there. She did the thing with her tongue right on the end that she knew Carol loved, and she was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath.

“Jess, that feels amazing,” Carol breathed heavily. “How did you even…”

“We’ve done this before,” Jess said, grinning. 

“Jess, I’m not going to remember all the things about you that you’re going to know about me,” Carol said. She looked… odd. Vulnerable. Not Carol. 

“I know,” Jess said, moving back up to snuggle her close to her. “I’ll just have to be a stud and show you how it’s done.”

“This is not how I imagined this going,” Carol said, eyebrow raised.

“Good or bad?” Jess said.

“I’m hoping good,” Carol said. “Just remember that with great power-“

“Comes the ability to seduce,” Jess finished for her. 

“That’s not even close to how that gooooooooooeeeess,” Carol trailed off as Jess trailed her tongue along the back of Carol’s jaw and ear in the way that she liked. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you,” Jess whispered into Carol’s ear.

They moved to the bedroom in a flurry of kisses. Carol’s tongue felt amazing as it moved along her lips and tongue and teeth. It wasn’t the sure, confident Carol tongue that she was used to, but more probing and exploring. It felt good to have Carol rediscover her, and to be able to feel Carol’s want for her again.

Jess intertwined her fingers in Carol’s hair and kissed her deeply. She felt Carol twist on top of her and fall with her onto the bed, holding her closely. 

Jess felt Carol’s tongue slide into her mouth as she pressed her down into the bed. She felt Carol’s hands start exploring out from her waist. Carol gently broke the kiss and leaned back.

“Jess, what are you comfortable with me touching?” Carol asked. 

“What are you comfortable touching? Because I like it when you touch me anywhere, but I don’t want to rush you into anything,” Jess said.

“It is weird,” Carol said. “Knowing that this is all familiar to you, and this is… I want to touch you everywhere, too.”

“Carol, what’s up?” Jess asked, cocking her head to the side.

“I know that I’ve done this before, with you, but I don’t remember about you. But it’s more than that,” Carol said. “I don’t remember anything. I remember how to do everything, because I’ve done it before, but I don’t remember who I did it with.”

“Carol, we don’t have to do anything if you’re not ready for that yet,” Jess said. 

“No, I want to, and I’m ready, it’s just that… It’s weird to not have a history with this kind of thing. I feel fragile,” Carol said. “I don’t know why, and I don’t like it…”

“Does it feel like the first time?” Jess asked quietly.

Carol let out a shallow breath and said, “Yeah.” 

“We can go as slowly as you want,” Jess said as she hugged Carol.

“Thanks,” Carol said into her hair.

“No problem at all. Although I guess I’ll have to add virgin despoiler to the red in my column,” Jess said with a smirk as she pulled back.

“Smart ass,” Carol said. 

“So that’s where you want to touch me,” Jess said with a smirk, which only got bigger when she saw Carol actually blush a little bit.

“Maybe,” Carol said as Jess felt her hand slip to her waist, and then to the small of her back. 

“Well, get to basket shopping then,” Jess said, as she moved back in for a kiss. She was rebuffed by Carol’s hysterical laughter.

“What on Earth does that mean?” Carol asked between peals of laughter.

“I want you to grope me,” Jess said, looking slightly offended. “It’s British. We did this last time.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re making this up,” Carol said, eyes grinning.

“That’s what you said last time,” Jess said huffily. 

“Well, I’m not complaining about your basket,” Carol said.

“That’s not really how it’s useeeeeed,” Jess sighed as Carol grabbed her cheeks in her hands and gently squeezed. “I’m just going to shut up now.”

They began to touch more and more of each other’s body, and Jess felt Carol start to relax into her touch the longer they lay on the bed. It did feel weird, if Jess thought about it too hard. But as Carol became more confident in her touches, more assertive, it felt more and more right. It felt like Carol again. 

To Jess, it felt like falling in a deep pool of water of after being parched. She wanted to drink in everything, but she was afraid she was going to drown.

She slowly made her way to the surface, and started sipping the water around her. A kiss here. A squeeze there. Some gentle kneading. And then Carol started going beyond simply being comfortable with her.

She could feel Carol’s hunger for her. It felt incredible to feel Carol on top of her, touching and squeezing and rubbing against her. After she felt slip a thigh between her legs, Jess stopped sipping and let the water fill her mouth, felt it pool in her stomach with incredible heat.

It felt good. Jess didn't worry about getting too close, or taking advantage of Carol, or being fragile.

Jessica felt herself melt into Carol, and for a little while at least, forgot to worry about drowning in affection.

\--------------

Jessica woke up the next morning, before the sun had even peeked over the horizon. She had a dream, one of her horrible waking nightmares about trying to escape from a metal box she had been locked in. 

She was a little girl again, and was rocking back and forth with all her might to try to not, until she was finally tipping over. But just as she was going to fall and crack the coffin into a million pieces, Carol appeared in the glass window.

Carol was crushed under the weight of the coffins, and her body cushioned the metal and stopped it from breaking. Carol’s bloody face, looking like it had in her delusion when Jess thought she had killed her, wasn’t just lightly dripping the sickening red liquid. It was gushing out, gallons of blood filling the coffin, cutting of her air, drowning her in blood. Just as she felt it start to slide down her throat, her eyes flew open. 

She didn’t scream, she simply awoke silently. It was a welcome change from how she normally awoke when she had a bad dream. Looking over at Carol, she saw that she wasn’t awake yet.

Jess stealthily disentangled herself from her Carol in her sleep, and slipped out of bed. She got dressed in her civilian clothes and quietly slipped out of the house. She left a note letting Carol know that she was going to be at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge at 7:00 if she wanted to join her, but that she understood if she didn’t wake up by then.

Jess went to a 24 hour pharmacy and bought a cheap green pen with obviously dignified sparkles and a strange off-brand pad of paper she had never seen before. Going to the alley behind the store, she lept partway up the wall and stuck there. Then she started her letter.

She needed to write so many letters, to so many people. Most of them weren’t around to receive them. But that wasn’t the point. 

Jess had been on the run for so long, she had forgotten that her past wasn’t past until she let go. She hadn’t had a chance to let go, with many of the things that shaped her, or warped her, she was never really sure which. She had needed to keep running to survive, sometimes from other people, sometimes from herself. 

She had tried so many times to stop herself from running. She tried to convince herself it didn’t work, that running was what was messing up her life. She tried to convince herself that running wasn’t an option.

Of course, she could always run, and running did keep the awfulness from overwhelming her.

But it hurt her. It was bad for her. It made her sick to her soul and it made her want to cry out in the night.

And for the first time she realized fully that she needed to stop running, not because she couldn’t, but because she was worth more than being swallowed by the horror of her experiences.

So she wrote her first letter.

It wasn’t good. It was long, and redundant and parts of it had long, run on sentences. But she finally said what she felt. She let herself feel what she had felt when everything she had written down had happened. 

She felt like she was going to vomit. She could feel her bra wicking up the light sheen of sweat that was covering her body. Her hand hurt. Her head pounded from the early morning hour and the lack of sleep or coffee and her tears wouldn’t come.

She started shaking as she screamed at herself to cry. She had definitely cried before, but she cried for other people. She never let her pain catch her willingly.

She could feel her skin prickle and bile in her throat. She felt silly for doing this; she should have just stayed in bed. This was a bad idea, and she should throw away the pen and pad and just focus on her job and her friends and her fucking perfect girlfriend and get over it already.

She kept scratching into the paper though. She made herself remember. She made herself remember all the pain, all the fear, how small and scared and worthless she felt. She pushed herself, and even the page and the pen started to fight her, so she pushed harder, attacking, ripping, scarring the page with all the venom in her, and then the page started to get blurry.

Jessica wept for herself. 

When she checked her phone, it was time for her to go.

She glided gently on the strong winds on the Hudson to the top of the bridge. Carol was already there, wearing her suit and a quizzical expression.

“I wrote my dad letter,” Jess said, her voice raw. “I’m going to need to write a lot of letters. But this one is to him. I wanted to start at the beginning.” 

“Oh Jess,” Carol said as she slipped her arms loosely around her. Jess almost felt herself flinch at the sympathy, but it was Carol. Carol didn’t see her as pathetic, and Carol’s presence made her feel comforted. 

Jess turned around with Carol’s arms still around her, pressing Jess’s back into Carol’s front comfortingly. Jess took the crumpled papers, pages and pages of tear-stained anger and self-loathing and sadness and fear, held them in her hand straight out from her body, and looking into the sun, burned them to ash with her venom.

She waited until the wind had picked clean the last ashes before she let the venom blast fully die in her fist. She lowered her arm and squeezed Carol’s, and wrapped herself just a little bit tighter in her arms as she stared into the early morning sun.

“Want to get waffles?” Jess asked.

“Yes,” Carol said, grinning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the unedited version because my lovely, wonderful editor has a cold atm, but I wanted to get this up and finally finish this story so I could have some closure and get to feel like I completed it. So basically I'm subjecting you to horrible my horrible spelling and phrasing to fill a hole in my emotions. It's fine, because I'm telling you what I'm doing. 
> 
> Writing this story has been amazing, and I want to thank everyone who read it, gave it kudos, and/or didn't flame me. I definitely want to write more stories about Carol/Jess, mostly because Dennis Hopeless exists and therapy is expensive.


End file.
